HISTORY OF INNOVATION

Consistent with the learning objectives of the master’s degree in management, curriculum in Innovation and Marketing, the course offers an overview of the theories used by business historians and historians of technology to study innovation and the innovative company. The first two weeks of the course provide students with the interdisciplinary theoretical skills and methodological foundations necessary to approach the study of innovation and innovative enterprise (social construction of technology, innovation systems, resource-based approach to the study of the history of the enterprise, …). During the following weeks, the students analyze some historical case studies in the light of the previously developed theories; the case studies illustrate how, throughout their history, companies have faced and managed organisational, technological, and political and social context changes. Students, through the critical analysis of texts, presentations, and discussions in class, learn to look at innovation as a socially and culturally determined complex phenomenon. In this light they begin to analyze the challenges of the transition to sustainability.

1. Students understand the differences between the First, Second, and Third Industrial Revolutions, place them over time, and refer to relevant case studies.
2. Students distinguish and recognize the existence and dynamics of different types of innovation; recognize the social, institutional, and technical components of the innovation process and their interaction.
3. Students explain and summarize how technical innovation works and can refer knowledgeably and with reference to concrete examples and to various theories of innovation.
4. Students distinguish the role of institutions in promoting or slowing down innovation, critically discuss historical and contemporary case studies.
5. Students can reconstruct and formulate hypotheses regarding the various innovative strategies that companies and brands have adopted throughout their history, regarding continuity and discontinuity, analogies, and differences.
6. Students formulate hypotheses about continuity and discontinuity between current and past innovation strategies.
7. Students comment and present historical case studies, make hypotheses, present their point of view by referring to the theories illustrated in class and their previous knowledge.

Basic knowledge of general history

Part I – Concepts, issues, and perspectives

1. Presentation of the course content, requirements, and of assessment methods. Basic conceptual distinctions.
2. Innovation, the economy, and the firm: the linear model and the production function; Schumpeter’s creative destruction; the resource-based approach.
3. Innovation in its environment: the systemic view; national innovation systems.
4. Innovation as socio-technical construction : the STS approach(es).
5. Why should we study the history of innovation?
6. Measuring past and present innovation.

Part II – Innovation in history: an overview
7. Innovation before the Industrial Revolution.
8. Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the First Industrial Revolution.
9. The modern corporation, industrial research, and the Second Industrial Revolution.
10. The State, the Universities, and the Third Industrial Revolution.

Part III – Case studies
11. Innovation, Marketing, and the Automobile.Marketing,
12. Branding, and Shaping Customer’s Tastes.
13. Path dependence, lock-in effects, and suboptimal innovation.
14. Innovation and Sustainability.
15. Exam (simulation).

Reading unit 1: Fagerberg, Jan. 2005. “Innovation. A Guide to the Literature”, in Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford University Press, 1-26.
Reading unit 2: Lazonick, William. 2005. “The Innovative Firm”, in Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson. Op. cit., 29-55.
Reading unit 3: Nuvolari, Alessandro and Michelangelo Vasta. 2015. “The Ghost in the Attic? The Italian National Innovation System in Historical Perspective, 1861–2011.” Enterprise & Society, 16 (2), 270–90.
Reading unit 4: Pinch, Trevor J. and Wiebe E. Bijker. 1987. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts”, reprinted in Johnson, Deborah. J. and Jameson M. Wetmore. Editors. 2021. Technology and Society. Building Our Sociotechnical Future, MIT Press, p. 109-136
Reading unit 5: Bruland, Kristine and David C. Mowery. 2005, “Innovation through Time”, in Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson. Op. cit., 349-379.
Reading unit 6: Smith, Keith. 2005. “Measuring Innovation”, in Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson. Op. cit., 148-177.
Reading unit 7: De Vries, Jan. 1994. “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution”, The Journal of Economic History, 54 (2), 249-270.
Reading unit 8: Koehn, Nancy F. 1997. “Josiah Wedgwood and the First Industrial Revolution”, in McCraw, Thomas, editor. Op. cit., 19-48.
Reading unit 9: Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. 1973. “Decision Making and Modern Institutional Change”, The Journal of Economic History, 33 (1), 1-15.
Reading unit 10: Colli, A. and Corrocher N. 2013. “The Role of the State in the Third Industrial Revolution: Continuity and Change”. In: Dosi, G., Galambos, L., Gambardella, A., and Orsanigo, L. (eds) 2013. The Third Industrial Revolution in Global Business. Cambridge University Press, 229-251.
Reading unit 11: McCraw, Thomas and Richard S. Tedlow. “Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and the Three Phases of Marketing”, in McCraw, Thomas, editor. Op. cit., p. 266-300.
Reading unit 12: Koehn, N. F. 1999. “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food”, The Business History Review, 73 (3), 349-393.
Reading unit 13: David, Paul. 1985. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”, The American Economic Review, 75(2), 332-337.
Reading unit 14: M. Eisler. 2020. “Public Policy, Industrial Innovation, and the Zero-Emission Vehicle”, Business History Review, 2020, 94(4), 779-802.

1. Online forum: one memo per week to be posted by Tuesday evening. Write a post commenting on the most relevant or interesting concept that you have found in one of the previous week’s readings. The memos will be visible to your peers, and you are supposed to interact each other. Feedback and further discussion on Thursday classes (5 memos on time for 1 extra point).

2. Oral and written presentation: from lessons 7 to 14, group presentations (4 students maximum per team) of one of the texts (in bold characters in the references sections) containing case studies. These texts are available on Moodle. Students need to discuss the text in both oral and written form. They must prepare a presentation (maximum of 20 minutes, with accompanying slides), where they identify notably : a) what makes the interest and relevance of the case study; b) the main disciplinary/theoretical frame adopted by the author(s); c) the research hypothesis; c) the methodology or methodologies used; d) and the results. In the following week, the team must submit a short essay (1 000 words max.) recapitulating these points and mention what they have learned from the case study. Grade: 1, 2 or 3 extra points.

3. Final exam: for all students, written exam covering all readings (not references) and the slides prepared by the professor for each class. The exam will include a combination of open questions and fixed answers. Each lecture’s slides will include a series of questions from which will be chosen those included in the exam. Exam will take place on Wednesday 20 March from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. in room 3A at san Giobbe.

Lectures, discussions and case studies

English

written and oral